What the latest delivery data tells us about viability, planning reform and London’s housing pipeline.

Despite renewed policy intervention, the latest data presents a fragile picture of housing delivery in London. Private starts remain exceptionally weak, affordable completions are down, and the forward pipeline across tenures is deteriorating. Whilst the data indicates that London’s affordable housing delivery pipeline is beginning to experience modest acceleration, this by no means points to a wider sustained housebuilding recovery. The improvement is concentrated in grant-supported starts and should not be read across to the private market.

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The draft London Plan, published last week, looks to respond directly to the delivery crisis. It sets a capacity-derived target of about 558,000 homes over 2027/28-2036/37, while retaining a longer-term goal of meeting the government’s assessed need of 850,000 homes. It explicitly recognises shorter-term deliverability limits and proposes differentiated affordable housing thresholds, a faster planning route, supply diversification and selective Green Belt release.

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That direction of travel broadly supports the argument in this paper: London needs more flexible, delivery-aware policy. The challenge is that several proposed mechanisms still depend on viable schemes, availability of grant funding, effective borough implementation and a functioning Building Safety Regulator. The Plan can reduce planning friction and widen land supply but cannot on its own restore sales values, lower construction and finance costs or create grant capacity.

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